For the last few years, PC manufacturers have devoted incredible engineering resources to giving their laptops gymnastic capabilities. Dell made a laptop whose screen could spin quickly inside its frame. Toshiba’s Satellite could fold flat and slide closed, as if slipping under a limbo pole. Lenovo made a whole line of products called Yoga, which are not to be confused with the Asus Taichi lineup. (No one made the “Ommmm,” which seems like a missed opportunity.) Just about every device anyone made somehow flipped, rotated, contorted, or sawed itself in half, Penn and Teller-style.

There’s some of that heritage in the new Microsoft Surface Book. It detaches into two pieces at the touch of a button, its screen snapping free from its keyboard base. Ta-da!

There’s just one key difference: basically every other convertible has tried too hard to be all things to all people, doing everything under the sun and none of it well. The Surface Book, on the other hand, is a laptop. A great one.

It’s not a great tablet, and it’s a bad convertible—it’s really, really hard to make a device that is equally adept as both desk-bound workhorse and bag-friendly touchscreen. Microsoft gets that, or seems to. It also seems to understand that those things don’t matter; the most important thing a $1,500 laptop needs to do is be a laptop. All the good things about the Surface Book are laptop things, and everything else is just there if you want it.

The first thing you notice is definitely the hinge. Excuse me: the “dynamic fulcrum hinge.” There’s a cool development backstory to the “dynamic fulcrum hinge,” but essentially, it was made so the screen could have a battery and processor inside without being so heavy it would tip over backwards.

The hinge also gives the 3.34-pound laptop a really cool, unique look, like a folio or a rolled-up magazine that doesn’t quite come closed. (It’s a little less than an inch thick at the back.) Other than the worries I have about what might get in the crack where the hinge doesn’t quite let the two halves close, I love it.

There’s almost a subtly aggressive feeling to the Surface Book. The all-aluminum look, right down to the keyboard and trackpad, makes it feel like it was forged in the fiery depths of a live volcano. There’s no branding other than the reflective Windows logo behind the display. The sharp edges and clean lines are almost like a prototype a PC maker would build before mucking it up with gimmicky branding and bad ideas. It’s not quite as slick and polished as a MacBook, but it’s great looking just the same.

The story of the Surface Book is really the story of two halves. Top and bottom. Screen and keyboard. Tablet and laptop. They dock together to make a clamshell notebook. You can flip the screen over, lay it down on top of the keyboard…and make a heavier tablet. Or you can just yank it out, and use it like a really giant tablet.

The top half is a 3,000 x 2,000, 13.5-inch screen that is clear and detailed and has absolutely absurd viewing angles. The screen is touch-enabled and pen-enabled. Its slightly taller 3:2 aspect ratio is what every laptop should be—a little more vertical real estate goes a long way. Microsoft doesn’t have “Retina” branding like Apple does, but its displays are every bit as good.

The Surface Book’s Intel processors—the latest version, Skylake, starting with an i5 chip on the base model—are inside that top half, along with most of the other necessary computing tools. That means you can press the button on top of the Surface Book’s keyboard and detach it at any moment. The top half is lighter and easier to carry than a 13.5-inch tablet seems like it would be, and especially with the included Surface Pen is a nice panel to draw on. The huge screen is a battery suck, though: I only got about four hours of use in general, and a two-hour movie on 100 percent brightness (Tomorrowland, it was terrible) dropped it all the way to 16 percent.

I don’t think Microsoft cares about things like tablet-only battery life, though. These modes are for showing someone a PowerPoint, or occasionally watching a movie in your hotel room. Microsoft doesn’t even call it “tablet mode,” it calls it “Clipboard mode.” If you want a tablet to use all day, every day, Microsoft has one of those. Buy a Surface Pro 4, they’ll tell you. That’s a tablet. This is a laptop.